Training Resources and Articles on Negotiation

This is a team building exercise suitable for all ages and both the academic and professional world. The aim is to get a number of teams to work together on a common task and understand the importance of working towards a particular target. You can easily customise the exercise to explore a variety of concepts on management and teamwork.

The main task in this exercise involves creating a menu for a particular event. Groups get to create, share and defend their choices which allow you to explore topics such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving, goal setting, cooperation, negotiation and persuasion.

The ability to persuade people is a useful skill both in personal and professional life. This exercise is ideal once you have covered persuasion skills in your training course and want to go through a more demanding exercise that requires people to persuade each other strongly. It is an entertaining exercise as it involves everyone in a simple yet powerful setting.

To truly get the best from this exercise, you can follow it with a review and discussion. You will need to take notes during the exercise as each can play differently. You will need to refer back to the strategies used by participants while persuading each other during discussions. You can then comment on the effectiveness of these techniques and get delegates to discuss them.

This team building exercise presents groups with challenges which require solutions to seemingly easy problems. Delegates need to plan, construct and execute their solutions quickly in order to beat other teams. The aim is to make a balloon go slowly upwards, the slower the better. The team with the slowest balloon wins.

Humans are predictable. Magicians have taken advantage of this predictability for generations. Knowing how to read people helps you significantly in your negotiations, persuasions and overall communications. This ability to predict human behaviour is often related to our evolutionary past. As we have evolved to survive in our environment, we have acquired a lot of “hardwiring” in our brain which now simply dictate our behaviour. We are all too familiar with some of the common behaviours such as seeking water when thirsty or wanting to leave the meeting room when we can no longer hold it.

However, some of these hardwiring and their consequences are more subtle and a careful observation can give the observer a significant advantage in predicting the eventual behaviour. It's all about reading non-verbal signals, where people are looking, their body orientation, their posture, their eyes, their legs and other gestures.

In this article, a particularly useful body language technique is presented that helps you read people and understand what people are likely to do before they do it and to use this knowledge to your advantage. This also helps you to improve your communication skills as you don't have to rely primarily on what people say and can read other non-verbal signals to understand them.

Reciprocal teaching is a technique used by trainers and teachers to facilitate understanding a piece of text. It is designed to promote comprehension by looking at a text from several different angles.

The technique was developed by Palinscar (1986) with an aim to facilitate collaborative investigation. The four comprehension strategies used in this technique are:

Summarising

Questioning

Clarifying

Predicting

By alternating between these roles, group members can share their analysis with each other systematically while focusing on many aspects of a piece of information or text.

This technique can also be used as a brainstorming technique to prepare for negotiations, making critical decisions and problem solving.

This exercise is ideal for team building and negotiation where delegates learn to share their resources and also negotiate with each other in a competitive environment. They will learn that cooperation can be much more effective than direct competition or being difficult.

This exercise encourages creativity and helps delegates to come up with a larger variety of solutions. The activity also enables participants to evaluate and compare the influence and effect of using expert views in solving problems. This activity is suitable for groups of people who have access to Internet and phone during the training session.

This exercise allows participants to recognise and appreciate the range of talents and achievements each individual brings to the team. Identifying and acknowledging individual abilities increases team members confidence in what they can accomplish as a group.

Negotiation is the process of bargaining that precedes an agreement. Successful negotiation generally results in a contract between the parties. Best type of negotiation is “win-win” which means both parties will be satisfied with the result.

“Win-Win” negotiation is about alliance not conflict. Successful negotiation results in long lasting and fruitful professional relationships between parties, reduced tension and stress associated with aggressive bargaining methods and leads to more productive and creative businesses.

In this article we explore five steps to a more successful negotiation for all parties involved:

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